Gap Year
by SeraSearaSpin
Summary: In between loops, Kuroha finds some time to enjoy himself.


**How come I always think of these things when I'm supposed to be sleeping? **

**Real question: Why _does_ the wide-eyed snake want all the snakes to unite around the queen? I think that grants one what they desire (probably wrong), but what _does_ the snake desire? World domination? To pull everyone into the daze? Soda?**

**Review! :D**

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Once again, a failure.

The child rewound the loop - really, it was more of stepping sideways to spin a new loop out of thin air - and disappeared, taking the prize with her.

_I'll have to start over again._

Exasperated, Kuroha exhaled and came to his feet with a feline grace his counterparts had never possessed. His hands were sticky, stained dark red, and he absently extended his tongue and let the rusting flavor of blood soak into his senses. The choking scent of metal was comforting, a thick blanket around his shoulders.

_How long has it been, anyway?_ He carelessly wiped his hands on the fabric of a green hoodie. _A year, no, more than that. A decade, maybe two. Seems about right._

It was a monotonous duty. Lurking deep inside Konoha, silently anticipating the day he could make his move, hoping that _this time_ he could reunite the snakes. Or at least that was his original purpose. To tell the truth, he was simply fond of slaughtering them one after the other, right in front of the child's eyes. First a necessity, it was now the highlight of his career. He lived for this, the blood, the screams, fading hearts beating with that most human of emotions, love. Such pitiful lives, and wasn't it grand that he was able to grace them with his presence before ending them?

They were never pleased. That was the problem. They wanted to reside permanently within a beautiful world, erase the past, deceive it away- but once they blinded themselves to harsh realities, the veil had to be ripped off. Utopias were an entirely improbable method of society. Chaos was much more predictable. He grinned at the contradictory statement, and it was not a pleasant sight to behold.

_Ungrateful little children. After all I've done for you..._

While musing, Kuroha pulled the tie from his hair, raked it back into a neat tail, and put it back up. He liked to feel tidy.

Yellow eyes rolled towards the children, and he tapped a finger against his lip. "How to arrange you this time?" he reflected aloud. "To be found sooner or later?" This round, he'd cornered them in the warehouse that served as their base. It attracted less attention than killing them outright on the street, and gave him more time to play.

Decided, he grabbed a fistful of purple cloth and dragged the body it contained to a chair, heedless of the crooked stain it left on the floor. It wasn't his property, so he could afford the mess. Matted green hair swung forwards as the head lolled, and he sighed and re-settled the concealer in the chair until she sat naturally.

"And why not embrace a liar? You know you love him deep down inside," said the snake in a teasing tone, though it didn't matter whether he said anything or not. Everyone was dead.

Predictably, the black hoodie was next, the cat-eyed boy arranged in the little space that remained in the chair. One slack arm looped around the concealer's shoulders, and Kuroha ran his fingers through the stained blond hair until it mussed over his forehead, nearly hiding the third eye he'd placed there. After a moment's consideration, he turned the heads towards each other in an obscene mockery of romance. "Ah, young love," he crooned, and doubled over from laughter.

Next up was the owner of the green hoodie. The boy was tall, but Kuroha had little difficulty maneuvering him onto the couch with his legs folded underneath him. Blood seeped from the holes in his abdomen and stained the snake's clothing, but he didn't really mind. Blood or no blood, it was all the same, and besides, he liked the color. Supposedly the color of a hero, it was instead the color of their demise.

The idol came after, her eye-catching ability no longer quite as powerful with half her face caved in. To break the silence, Kuroha hummed her first and only single, the one that'd gotten her into this mess. The irony amused him as he draped her in the middle of the couch.

Then was the little boy, the one who was first into his trap. His small body was half shattered and hideously malformed. The impact had probably pulverized his innards. Through a crater in his ribcage, a cavernous grotto shining a fleshy pink could be seen, jumbled raw hamburger inside a bleeding hollow. He was placed on the other side of the idol girl, leaning back into the cushions. If one didn't look at the ruin of his torso, his unmarred face was calm enough to be sleeping.

"Last but not least," called Kuroha, imitating the voice of an announcer, "We have the one...the only...hikiNEET!" He indicated the red-jerseyed pile on the ground with a dramatic sweep of his arm, and paused for a moment, as if waiting for applause. Of course, none was forthcoming, and he picked up the young man, whose gaping slit throat smiled at him. With some effort, it appeared he was leaning casually on one hand, sprawled languidly in the remaining chair. The pieces of his phone sat in his lap.

Having arranged the corpses of the children to his satisfaction, Kuroha took a few steps back to admire his handiwork. _Now they're all in order._ He turned slowly, counting up from one. The gap between three and five irked him, as did the strange set of five, eight, seven, six, but it would've made less sense to put them in complete numerical order. And the couch wasn't long enough, anyway. Only the small boy would do.

It seemed the cadavers were centered around the television, as most families would be on a Friday night. A charming tableau. He hopped on top of the television, swinging his legs like a small child.

"So, how are we this fine evening?" asked Kuroha, offering a charming smile. "I hope we're feeling all right, though some of you appear a little under the weather."

No response.

The snake tilted his head to one side to listen. "Really? That's a shame." He twisted his features into a distorted expression of pity. "I heard that the weather was going to be exceptionally fine tomorrow, nothing like this summer heat." Kuroha chuckled at his joke. "But when death comes a-callin', what can you do?"

He imagined that the look on the NEET's face was a sort of rueful 'beats me' expression, and turned his yellow eyes on him, glad to have an audience. "I've heard there are a few ways to stop its inevitable approach. You should ask your little digital friend there, she may kno- Ah, but she's incapacitated too, isn't she?" He cast his gaze to the shattered phone. "She can't be here anymore. Sure, she still may live in some other place, but a bigger problem lies ahead; you're dead as well! Our wandering virus has no home to return to."

He clapped his hands and grinned like someone who had just delivered a well-thought-out joke and was now reaping the laughter gained, but as the silence continued, the smile dropped off his face. He closed his eyes, sighed, buried his face in his hands and pulled it back out, leaving drying red streaks across his eyelids like war paint. "You know, you're not all that fun to talk to."

Their pathetic excuse for a headquarters was silent. A car passed by on the street outside.

"I'm giving you the pleasure of my company. You should at least _smile_ a little, acknowledge my presence. My time is infinitely more precious than yours." He paused for a moment. "Actually, no, at this point time has no meaning anymore. It's simply the space between the end of one loop and the beginning of the next, before I leave this route. But my time is still superior. Living time, repeated time. You exist to waste it."

Kuroha hopped off the TV and went to the nearest corpse. It was the girl in the purple hoodie, and he tilted her head back towards him. "Hey, honey, smile." He patted her pallid flesh, and her head slumped sideways, half-closed eyes fixing on some point beyond him.

The reciprocal smile he'd exhibited as a demonstration froze, deforming and becoming more and more like a sneer with every passing second. "I said, _pay attention to me_. I ended your life. I am the most important person you have ever met. I remember how you screamed... so nicely, like music. And if you can - " his mouth quirked at his bawdy choice of words, disfiguring the sneer further "- pleasure me like that, then you have a skill indeed. I haven't heard you scream like that for...could it have been months already? Ah, how time passes..."

He shook his head, gathering the memories to the back of his mind, where they settled like so many cobwebs, and tipped her jaw towards him. "But you've not died for me to ramble at you. Smile."

Of course, the concealer did nothing. Kuroha let out a fearful snarl, tightening his grip on her chin, and then smoothed his composure over his face. "I hate to break my toys before I'd even used them well." That was all the warning he gave, and then with both hands crammed into her mouth, pulled them apart. He'd done this before, many times, for example maybe a week (_time is too hazy, rushes around him in gauzy streamers and blurs the clarity of things until a memory of a moment beyond the daze is raised to magnificence)_ ago while the brave boy was alive and the child screamed out in horror and he'd laughed and laughed and laughed. It did take effort- there were far too many things connecting the jaw to the face, tendons and ligaments and the like, but he'd had decades to perfect his technique.

There was a ripping, meaty sound, and Kuroha applied more force, tearing the skin on either side of the mouth in a sweeping curve, stunningly bright alizarin against the paleness of her face. Blood mixed with saliva on the exposed molars, a filmy pale red, and only once the skin was torn did the snake lever the jawbone loose with a thunderous _crack_. Her jaw gaped down, swinging a little from the memory of the force. Teeth and tongue hung at a grotesque angle, and knobs of bone protruded, little lumps below her ears like knobby knuckles.

But she was smiling, in a sweeping crimson fissure that arced across her features. _Hey, honey, smile._

"There," said Kuroha, pleased. The girl's blank expression didn't match her the rictus lower half of her face, but for now, that was of little import. One of his audience smiled, grinned, enjoyed his presence.

"You see?" With one hand, he swept his arm over the collection, spattering small scarlet beads in an arc. He was momentarily transfixed by the beauty of streetlamps illuminating the spheres, diluted light and fading roses. "One person appreciates me. One out of you has a brain, a mind, and why not it be your fabulous leader? Take some initiative, learn from her example."

As if on cue, the jaw sagged, and it looked more as if she were screaming in pain than grinning.

The snake didn't mind this.

"Now, look at her. No; better yet, look at _me_. See what I have done, see the example I have made?" Dead, cold marbles stayed stock-still in their sockets, and his euphoria vanished, to be replaced with the creeping rage. In a fit of pique, he flung himself onto the couch, shoving the idol onto the ground.

"What, are you too good for me? Don't want to cast eyes upon your opponent? The victor? Are you that much of a bad sport? Come, come, let's line up and shake hands." His lips curled, pulled back from his teeth. His hands were full of the pink cloth.

"I will make you look at me, and that's all you will see forever. My visage was printed on your mind as you died; let it remain collected by your eyes, those poison-tainted red eyes. And I don't have the key. The child left me."

He took on a conversational tone, though his face remained a horror. "You see, I erode her defenses. Every route ends in a crossroad. Be the queen, or be the martyr. A pair of decisions, make an X, the route that crosses over, route XX. And as of yet, she's constantly holding onto her steel spine."

His fingers caressed the dull eyes, and he imagined the panicked life that used to reside in them. It turned the stretched, grotesque loathing into something that could've been a smile if anyone was around to see it. "What you do is give her that spine, make her think she can escape. If I can arrange for your father to come out of the haze instead of you, wouldn't it be a much better use of life? Your deadbeat brother would be cared for by both parents, and that _girl_-" His lips peeled away from his teeth. "he cared so much about would still die, sure. That's the center of the X. It occurs in every timeline. Unavoidable."

Kuroha shook his head. "A shame, though. I would've enjoyed breaking her. Drag those disgusting, filthy children she cares so much about in front of her and reduce them to a pile of quivering pink flesh. Then we can see who she really is…" He licked his lips as if the thought pleased him.

"But this time, your father, the only one in your rat's nest of a family with any sort of understanding of life at all, would prevent your useless brother from cut-cut-cutting his neck through, and thus the stupid deceiver wouldn't uproot the plan, for the infinite girl would have never met him. It's happened before, once or twice perhaps? It's so hard to twist the haze to my own will. That old hag of a medusa still has it in her thrall, and she fights me." He shook his head, still grinning the same grisly grin.

"But when I _do_ win…"

There was no need to finish the sentence; the idol girl's particular brand of encephalopathy prevented her from understanding, and besides, the memories of what had happened the few times he'd emerged the victor was enjoyable. No, more than simply 'enjoyable.' Decorum aside, it was pure bliss.

When he spoke again, his voice was a low, intimate rasp. "You see, then was when I was allowed to deviate. If I can control who goes in and out of the haze, I can swallow the world. All of the snakes are mine instead of hers, rising from her steaming corpse to dumbly obey my wishes…"

Even the memory of the screaming as a red and black maw opened in the sky sent a thrill of pleasure down his spine. People and buildings alike were sucked into the spiraling void, where his snakes awaited them.

"Imagine a hole in the world." Kuroha laid a hand on the cool skin of the intact side of the idol's head. "Just imagine it, and all of your bodies at my command, your snakes with the will bent to serve me. My reapers…and then, I have all the time in the world." He frowned. "Well, not all the time...the laws of time can be bent, but go for too long and it snaps you back in like a rubber band. Otherwise, I would've been content to raise hell for quite a long time." The tension was already pulling on him, the faintest of urges to phase out of this loop and into the next new one, from one route XX to another XX, if he had his way.

He lowered his lips to her ear. "_Imagine_. Look into my eyes, you can see it there. Promise."

The dead girl's eyes were rolled to the side, seeming sunken into their sockets. They didn't turn to gaze upon him, didn't hold the terrified shrieking raptured look that they had when he'd killed her. In fact, it seemed she was staring at the streak of white-gray-pink splashed up the wall, the backwash from the rotten boy's rotten mind. The snake hissed his displeasure.

"What, you're already broken, and you're mustering the strength to rebel? I _killed _you, I own your soul!" He shook his head in disbelief at her impertinence. "And yet you still defy me? Impressive, I have to say, though it won't get you anywhere."

Her ocular orb was smooth under his touch, and he wormed his fingers through the socket, recklessly splitting skin and muscle in his mad dash for the nerve. "And you see, I've been reaping your souls for years. I know what's going to happen before it happens. I know every movement, and you could not _imagine_ the tedious task that I enjoy. Your little minds can't expand enough to begin to understand me and mine." Kuroha's voice was a sibilant snarl, loaded full of hate and packed full of rage. He was wrist-deep in her head, groping for some unfathomable treasure.

With a wet slurp, the idol's head vomited up his hand, streaked with viscera and a few webbed strands of blood vessels that ruptured even as he raised his prize.

"Here we are," said the snake jubilantly, cradling the eye in his relatively clean hand, and dug in for the other, scrabbling to get purchase on the slippery surface. This was on the crushed side of her head, and fragments of bone and other things prodded his hand as he struggled to find the clump of nerves and vessels that made up her optic nerve. Finally, there it was, slimy against his fingers, and with a quick jerk he was able to snap it.

It dripped clear fluid into the now vacant socket, vitreous or aqueous or one of those sorts of things. It was imperfect from the battering he'd given her cranium, and he ruefully admitted that in retrospect, crushing her skull was a blunt and ugly way to finish her off.

But then again, she was guarding the child that was the key to this loop, and it was necessary. If only he could get his hands on her, the fragile part-medusa...he could make this reality the true one and reign king over it.

_Do you really want to do that?_ he asked himself, holding the undamaged eye up to his own._ How can you play with your dolls if they decompose? Isn't it better to live again and again and bathe in their blood?_

This was his purpose, to lock his realities into being the only realities, the only route. There was no sense in doubting. _It's why I exist, isn't it?_

He juggled the imperfect eye into his hand. It fit perfectly to the shape of his palm, though it left a snail's trail of slippery gel across his fingers. The fluid was already starting to congeal in the warm air, and it clung to the planes of his hand like a membrane. _It seems I must put my obligations before my happiness, much like the rest of the world. In that regard, I am not unique. I do what I must in order to earn a few seconds of happiness. _

And then, a bitter realization; _This must be what these children feel. I _am_ like them after all._

A surge of repulsion filled him, and for a moment, his brilliantly composed barrier wavered. A collection of white smudges, untouched by the corruption, pulsed and shook in its cage.

"No, Ninth," said Kuroha, only the smallest of quavers in his voice showing the internal revolution - not even a revolution, really, closer to a weak protest. "You've wasted your time, as you waste it every time, and your only worth to me now is as a body for me to inhabit." The words quelled the vibration of the bars, and the previous owner of this body subsided into a dark, dreamless sleep.

The snake smiled, and then looked down to find that in a reflex, he'd slammed his fist down around the imperfect eye, inhumanly strong fingers directing pressure towards the center until the weak resistance burst and it ruptured. His hand was dripping thick, pulpy strings of a red so dark it was almost black, and he opened his palm to observe. The aqueous fluids and vitreous gel mingled with bleeding muscle in a slow, sinuous tangle, and the cornea lay perforated and oozing, a tattered husk. He smeared his hand on the idol's face in a travesty of affection, drawing three parallel red lines under the yawning grotto of her eye sockets.

"Look at me," he whispered, rolling the remaining eye lightly through his palms. When he cupped his hands, the eye seemed to be staring up at him, curved surface starting to dry out slightly now that it was no longer within the warm womb of the skull.

Removing their eyes was a methodical process, a skill he'd had years to hone. His fingers were coated in globs of glutinous blood and fluid, slick-sliding over and through the yielding surfaces of their faces, occasionally taking a moment to remove the worst of the gelatinous sludge from his fingers by wiping them off on a convenient hoodie. Not all the eyes were flawlessly smooth. Some were damaged by his gouging fingers, and some were damaged from his previous attack. However, all were removed with a minimum of exertion, and sooner rather than later he ended up with his hands full of gleaming red-blotched marbles, some still oozing liquid onto his skin.

His face contorted into a grim mask, trying to suppress yet another smile that was bubbling up from the inside. I_'m always smiling in my borrowed time,_ he thought, slightly displeased. _Smiles, smiles. What are you so happy about?_

Kuroha answered his own question when he looked around at the assembled boys and girls, ungainly and vulnerable in death. The taste of metal on his tongue, the blood on his fingers, their attention focused on him - what wasn't there to be happy about?

He coveted attention, craved it like a drug. Did he want to be afflicted like the idol girl? Well, no, that was a curse. He wanted to be noticed, to be feared, in his natural state, without extra help from the medusa's spawn. It was his poison, his Achilles heel. But in this modern world, there was no traitorous Apollo to direct an arrow to his doom. He could soak up the attention they unwillingly directed to him like a sponge. They could look on him and marvel and fear and be horrified, sending jittering synapses into a fury of information, and when he touched them they would scream and scream and scream, a beautiful chorus of raw, high notes stretched over a loom and woven into a rippling rope, a noose, a scarf, and he donned it as if it were a physical manifestation of his happiness.

Another smile broke over his face like a jagged series of stitches, unsteady yet certain, twitching at the edges, unstable as a girl teeter-tottering on the precipice of a school roof. It was the face of death, and he needed them to fear him every time he tormented them.

_Little children, now is when you should be worried. Those wounds you hate so much and never recall will only increase again and again, double back, multiply tenfold. And each time, it only gets better and better._

He was laughing, his head tipped back and a scraping, chuckling laughter boiling out of him. It was no natural sound; rather, it was the repugnant, abrasive sound of metal screeching against bone, deep and hollow and malevolent to the core. It burst out of him, almost uncontrollable in its intensity, and he considered it another strand to add to the skein of hideous, exquisite noise that the lifeless children had once ejected into the air.

Eventually, the spasm of laughter passed, and the snake felt a sourceless, intangible sort of happiness. "I should take a vacation more often," he said reflectively, a note to no one but himself. "They're worth taking."

The tension in the invisible elastic that bound him to the newest route was still hardly perceptible - it would last up to a month if pressed, give or take a few hours, but Kuroha didn't need a month. All eyes were on him now, and he'd extracted maximum pleasure from the occurrence, stationing himself at the equilibrium point between enjoyment and effort.

"Yes," said the snake slowly, relishing the fullness of the word on his tongue, and drawing the 's' out in a suitably snake-like fashion. "I believe it's time to reset and try again."

He cradled the handful of eyes almost lovingly to his chest for a moment, feeling the pliable weight against the harsh lines of his torso, and then sighed deeply and arranged the optical organs in a neat little pile on top of television. He glided over to the children in their chairs, righting the hikiNEET from where he'd knocked him down in his agitated search for eyes and taking the time to arrange him the exact way he'd been before. _Clumsy of me_, he chided himself, and stepped lightly over the bloodstains to straighten a painting that'd been jarred crooked when he'd shot the deceiver.

_Cleanliness is close to godliness,_ he reminded himself with amusement. To be honest, he was fixated on this cleaning spree because his past selves, damn them, had been ridiculously sloppy creatures. First the idiot, and then the clueless, and apparently neither of them had ever figured out what a shelf was for.

When the room was cleaned to the snake's satisfaction, he stood and surveyed it for the last time.

Everything was quiet, eerie, perfectly arranged. No speck of dust marred the corpses or their furniture, and the blood he'd tracked onto the carpet had been cleaned out.

Kuroha gave a short, sharp nod, and treated himself to one last smile. "See you in the next loop, children."

The supple band anchoring him in real time was still faint, but he concentrated on it, using deft mental fingers to find the edges and unravel it far enough for him to slip between the fibers. The tangible sensations started leaving him, he was yanked into a vacuum and shot like a cannon through the infinite dark while standing with one hand on the doorknob, shutting it behind him.

He never looked back.


End file.
